This paper analyses referee home bias due to social pressure with data from the matches played in the First Division of the Spanish football league between the 2002/03 and 2009/10 seasons. The aim is to assess the behaviour of the referee in relation to two decisions, namely free kicks awarded and players booked. The variables used to explain referee behaviour are the number of spectators attending matches, the percentage occupation of the stadium and the existence or not of running tracks, all of which are intended to represent social pressure, in addition to referee experience. Furthermore, two control variables concerning ball possession and shots at goal are included. Regarding methodology, two random effects panel data regression models are estimated. The first model explains the difference in the number of home team fouls and away team fouls, while the second explains the difference in yellow and red cards shown to local and away teams. The results obtained cannot confirm, at least in the period under analysis, that Spanish football referees have been biased in favour of the home team when it comes to awarding free kicks. However, once a free kick has been awarded, there does appear to be a referee home bias in the punishment a player receives for committing a foul. These findings suggest that when there is a large crowd in the stadium, the referee tends to find it easier to book away team players than home players. A sensible hypothesis that could explain this result is that the time the referee has to make a decision does affect the final outcome. While referees are not biased when it comes to awarding a free kick, they are when given more time to make a decision, allowing social pressure to work in favour of the home time.

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eec:wpaper:1119. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Silviano Esteve)

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.